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Ed Carpenter Racing rolls onto Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course today in Lexington as one of the hottest teams in IndyCar, having won three times this season and having taken the Indianapolis 500 pole for the second straight year.

But the driver who won those poles, the team’s namesake and oval-track ace Ed Carpenter, won’t be driving on Sunday in the Honda Indy Grand Prix. Mike Conway, who won the series’ most recent race (the second race of the doubleheader on the streets of Toronto two weeks ago) will be in the cockpit again. Mid-Ohio is a road course, and Conway specializes in those.

Carpenter and Conway are drivers with disparate talents who stowed their egos to put together one of the more fascinating teams in IndyCar.

“It’s a really good match,” said Conway, a two-time race winner this season. “Hopefully, it will be a long and fruitful one.”

Conway swore off ovals a couple of seasons ago, mustering the courage to admit that they weren’t his strength after suffering a broken leg and cracked vertebra in a crash at Indianapolis in 2010 and another scary crash there in 2012 in which he was uninjured.

“I wasn’t enjoying it, and it wasn’t bringing out the best of me as a driver,” Conway said.

Carpenter, whose racing background included midgets and sprint cars on ovals before ascending to IndyCar, was almost always an also-ran on street and road courses. Although he was improving, he said he felt he owed it to his team primary sponsor, Fuzzy Zoeller’s Premium Vodka, and to his employees to give them the absolute best chance to win. So Conway was brought in this season.

“We have high expectations,” Carpenter said. “I feel like when I’m in the car we should be contending for wins (which he delivered at Texas Motor Speedway in June), and when Mike is in the car, I feel the same way.

“If you had asked us earlier in the year that we’d have three wins already by now, I probably wouldn’t have said ‘sure’ because you never know, especially with as much competition as the IndyCar series is. But at the same time, I did have high expectations.”

With three wins by two drivers, the case could be argued that Carpenter Racing has taken a mighty step toward the elite level in a series otherwise occupied by Team Penske, Target-Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti Autosport.

“I think we are one of the better teams; I don’t think we are quite elite yet, and that’s not a knock on our team because I believe our guys are doing a great job,” Carpenter said. “But to be considered elite, I think we have to continue to perform at the level we’ve been at this year for longer, and also do it consistently, like those teams have.

“We have too small of a sample size for me to classify as elite just yet.”

But the union of these two drivers is like no other in the series.

“Mike was a natural choice. There’s other good drivers out of work right now, but the difference between Mike and the others is we’re able to offer him exactly what he wants,” Carpenter said. “The fact he didn’t want to run ovals limited his opportunities with other teams, but for us it was perfect.”

Conway agreed, and he has wins at Long Beach and Toronto to prove it was a great choice for all concerned.

“It’s always good to see the smiles on the faces of our crew and everyone else involved when you’ve gotten a victory,” Conway said. “As Ed said after the race (at Toronto), he wouldn’t trade anyone of those guys on our team for anyone else. We’ve got a good group, and it’s working.”